The Past’s Past

Thomas Laqueur

  • Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History by Jay Winter
    Cambridge, 310 pp, £12.95, September 1996, ISBN 0 521 49682 9

We understand explicitly, as Nietzsche remarked in the Genealogy of Morals, what earlier generations felt in their bones: ‘Only that which does not cease to hurt remains in memory.’ Remembering and mourning demand that the past is somehow kept present; they demand recollection as the pain of immediate loss diminishes. And yet we – that is, we moderns – are also acutely aware of just how utterly past the past is, how historical it is, how even the worst horrors lose their sting. As Walt Whitman wrote of the Civil War:

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